This is a competing application for renewal of a postdoctoral training program in critical care research. This program has successfully implemented a project-oriented approach to training. This approach embraces a distributed model of research that encourages each trainee to use several established laboratories as resources which are brought to develop mechanistic solutions to questions which emerge from his/her project(s). This decentralized model of research and approach to training promotes scientific diversity in at least two ways. First, trainees master a broad spectrum of experimental strategies which will form the basis for their later transition to project leaders. Second, although trainees are trained, counseled and evaluated by a personal mentor and by core faculty of established investigators representing excellence in clinical research and basic science, trainees are encouraged to approach any member of the Washington University faculty whose interests converge with the trainee's interests to focus upon a research problem in critical care to serve as a research project mentor. This latter strategy has allowed the training institution to focus upon interdisciplinary challenges facing critical care investigators and encourage other members of the university community--trainees and established investigators alike--to lend their expertise to the solution of diverse problems in the biology of critical illness.